To Me, You are Purrfect
by A Fire in the Attic
Summary: When Derek wakes up, there's a cat in his apartment. "Oh," he says. Because it's not just a cat, it's a pregnant cat. A pregnant cat giving birth. "Oh."


**Prompt**: Donna tweeted that she wanted more fanfiction about Derek getting a cat and she is [Chris Traeger voice] _literally_ my favorite person in the world so I wrote about Derek getting kittens. She also requested Sterek and otherwise I would have probably made it Derica (secrets you now know).

**Word Count**: 2155

**Pairings**: Sterek, Derek/Erica bromance

**Notes**: post-season 3

* * *

When Derek wakes up, there's a cat in his apartment.

He rolls out of bed and pads through his apartment quietly, tracking the smell into the living room, just inside the giant hole in the wall.

"Oh," he says. Because it's not just a cat, it's a pregnant cat. A pregnant cat giving birth. "Oh."

Contrary to popular belief, Derek is not heartless. He's not going to kick a helpless animal out of his apartment. Especially not a fluffy calico who is giving birth.

It does raise the problem that his apartment is still not impenetrable. But then, it's been two years since the pack was seriously threatened. The local hunters are still pulling petty pranks on a weekly basis (last week, he'd set his coke down for a second to grab some napkins, and when he'd walked back to his table in the cafe, he'd opened the bottle to discover that someone had shaken it. Foam splattered across his shirt. There was a wolfsbane petal underneath his fork, apparently as a calling card. He'd sighed, wiped his shirt off with the napkin, and asked for a new fork. He had also managed to ignore the hunters high fiving a couple tables away, but that sort of patience came from dealing with teenagers on a regular basis.

The hunters were losers who needed to step up their game.)

But nothing has been actively harmful, and he's started to ease up on the recitation of "constant vigilance" (which always sent Scott and Stiles into peals of laughter that he just didn't get). Which is why wild animals are getting into his apartment. The cat is definitely a stray, because he can't smell a single human on her. He _can_smell the tomcat that got her pregnant, and he could track down the father, only he isn't sure what cat society thinks about absent fathers. Is that a normal thing?

Tiny mewls fill the air suddenly, and Derek can't resist walking back to check on the first kitten. She's small and white, with big blue eyes that stare up at him in confusion. Her mother starts cleaning her as though she's not still giving birth.

Derek has never been happier to be human. And also a male. He walks away again. Maybe he should go grocery shopping.

* * *

When he comes home, the mother is feeding her five kittens—or, rather, she's sleeping and the kittens are eating anyway.

Cats are weird.

She blinks one eye open lazily and regards him with disinterest.  
Her message is clear. "This is home now."

He recognizes the stubbornness in her gaze. It kind of reminds him of Scott, actually. So he sends her his own message by putting a bowl of cat food and a bowl of water in front of her.

So he bought some while he was at the store. Whatever. It's just a ten pound bag.

* * *

"Derek, there are kittens on your couch," Erica says.

"I know," he answers, rolling his eyes. He's in the kitchen, trying to decide if today is a day to juice some vegetables for dinner, or if he should eat pizza bagels. He's leaning toward the pizza bagels.

The youngest of the kittens looks like her mother—she's a fluffy calico with blue eyes. She likes to treat his leg like a tree and has managed to scramble all the way up to sit on his hip.

"Where am I supposed to study?"

"The table," he suggests. He added the table expressly for Erica. No one else ever came to the apartment (thank you, out of city colleges) but Erica is finishing up her last year of high school and prefers to study away from her mother. (There's a whole bundle of familial tension that he isn't going to touch. He knows Erica doesn't get along with her mother and would probably move out all together if she wasn't so close to her dad.)

"I don't like the table."

Derek rolls his eyes again. The kitten is climbing up his back now. He's glad he doesn't care for this shirt.

Erica ends up using the table anyway, but the kittens follow her, the small white one climbing up onto her lap. She plays with it idly, letting the tiny claws catch on her finger tips and rubbing it's belly. The majority of her attention is still fixed on the worksheet she's doing.

The two black kittens that look almost identical (except for a white sock on one of them) start playing with her shoelaces. Erica remains unphased, just slipping out of her shoes to gently pet the cats with her feet.

"You're a cat person," Derek says, because Erica keeps facts about herself hidden, and he catalogs anything revealing. She does the same for him, and that's why she's his favorite beta. And his best friend. It's not complicated and he doesn't want to make it that way.

"So are you," she says. "Or at least, I assume you are, based on the presence of six cats and a fifty pound bag of cat food."

He'd gone grocery shopping again. Whatever.

He shrugs and sits down next to her while he waits on the bagels to finish. The kitten has managed to climb on his shoulder by now, and he imagines he probably looks like a pirate. Only cats are more vicious than parrots, so this probably looks cooler. Maybe.

Erica snaps a picture of him when he's not looking at her, presumably to stop the eye flare. He watches her send it to Stiles, which—_ugh_.

Stiles immediately responds with a string of letters that make no sense: "aoevihwepighanjevokegoaypioshe!" and then follows it up with "my ovaries just exploded" which of course makes no sense at all.

"Derek," Erica says. "Stiles won't be able to have children now."

"That doesn't make sense," he says.

Erica texts Stiles as much, only she embellishes by saying, "Your boyfriend is confused and mildly aroused."

"Erica," he says and he's not whining. "Stop it."

Stiles responds with, "He's not my boyfriend."

"Lover in the night," Erica says aloud as she types it out. "That's more accurate, isn't it?"

Stiles doesn't answer that text, probably because he texts Derek instead. "You got a cat?"

"Six," Derek sends back.

"You need a girlfriend," Stiles replies.

The timer for the pizza bagels goes off and Derek is saved by the bell. Or he thinks so, but when he comes back to the table with the bagels, he has six text messages from Stiles that read, in order:

"Is that on the table?"

"What the hell, man! You can't just say things like that."

"Dude."

"Answer me."

"aspogihaepovehaotia DEREK"

"SERIOUSLY"

"Erica, what did you do?" Derek asks, sighing.

"Nothing," she says innocently.

He looks at his sent messages and sees the most recent one which reads, "Are you volunteering?"

He throws the phone at Erica's head and leaves the room, taking his kitten and the pizza bagels. Erica can suck it.

Her laughter follows him out of the room.

* * *

In his bedroom, the mother is sleeping on his bed. The only grey kitten is curled up next to her. He basically never leaves her side.

Derek sits down next to them on the bed. He puts the pizza bagels on his nightstand and carefully unhooks the claws of the kitten on his shoulder before cradling her to his chest.

He should probably name the cats if they're all going to stay here. Which…at this rate, they probably are. So he's an old cat lady. Whatever.

"You're my new best friend," he informs the kitten.

"Hey," Erica calls from the dining room. "Don't give my spot away to a little boy cat."

"She's a girl and her name is Lucy," he calls back. He nuzzles her nose and kisses her head. "Lucy Liu," he whispers. "But that's between you and me."

Lucy meows at him and climbs up his face to sit on his head.

His phone starts ringing and Erica appears in his doorway to throw it at him. She aims for his stomach instead of his head, presumably because Lucy is perched there. "Can I name this one?" she asks, holding up the white kitten by the nape of it's neck. It doesn't look unhappy at all.

"As long as you don't name her Snowball," he says.

"Duh," she says, rolling her eyes.

He answers his phone while she continues to think about the name, holding the cat right in front of her face to stare into her eyes.

"Hello?" he says.

"_Dude!_" Stiles shouts into the phone. "What did you mean by that?"

Derek holds the phone away from his ear. "Erica sent that. I think it's insulting that you assumed I was straight and also that having a lot of cats means I'm not getting laid enough."

"Dude, you could get laid at any time. And it was also a joke." Stiles is quiet for a second. "Do you seriously have six cats?"

"Yes."

"_Why_?"

"Because I like them," Derek says blankly.

In the doorway, Erica exclaims, "Snookums."

"You can't name my cat _Snookums_," Derek says, absolutely disgusted.

Erica pouts. "You said I could name her."

Derek groans. "Fine."

"Can I name a cat?" Stiles asks.

"You'd have to be here to do that," Derek bargains. He might be interested in why Stiles non-existent ovaries exploded. Also why he needed to send six text messages of disbelief and possible interest in response to not-Derek's flirty text.

"Okay, so I'll come over this weekend," Stiles says.

"Deal," Derek says. There's a long pause where Derek runs a hand over the mother's head, and Lucy jumps down from his head to land in his lap. She sticks her head under his shirt and curls up there, presumably to take a nap.

"So…Erica's text message?" Stiles says.

"Yeah," is all Derek answers with.

"Um." Stiles clearly doesn't know how to proceed, and Derek takes pity on him.

"Well, _were_ you volunteering? If you're going to name my cat we need a stronger relationship." And yeah, Derek's still got it. He smirks down at Lucy, and even though she's asleep, he's pretty sure she's telepathically complimenting his game.

"_Erica_ named one," Stiles says, the pout apparent in his voice. "Are you dating her?"

"She's my best friend, doofus."

"So it is on the table," Stiles says, and abruptly hangs up the phone.

What a freaking weirdo.

* * *

But Stiles shows up early Saturday morning in that black shirt Derek borrowed once (he knows because he can still smell the blood). Stiles fills it out a lot better now, to say the least.

"What up, where my kittens at?" Stiles asks.

"They're my kittens," Derek says, but Stiles pushes by him and immediately drops to his knees to play with the two black kittens.

"This is officially the coolest place to hang out," Stiles says as he produces a ball of yarn from seemingly no where and rolls it across the floor. The twins chase after it happily, tackling each other in their haste to reach the yellow string first.

"Where are the others?" Stiles asks.

As if on cue, Lucy crawls up from her position on Derek's back to sit on his shoulder and meow at Stiles. "Various places," he says drily.

Stiles laughs and jumps to his feet to walk around in search of the others. "Do you have an orange one?"

"No," Derek says.

"A grey one? I want to name him Eeyore."

"You are so lame," Derek tells him, but doesn't protest the name.

They find the mother, who Derek has started to refer to as Mama, watching Snookums and Eeyore wrestle on the floor. When the two of them walk into the room, Snookums rushes straight at Stiles' feet and starts batting at the hem of his jeans.

Eeyore, the chubbiest of the kittens by far, toddles over to his mother to curl up into her side.

Stiles makes a high-pitched noise that only vaguely resembles a coo and points at Eeyore. "He really _is _Eeyore."

"Yeah," Derek agrees. "He doesn't like anybody. Except Mama."

"So I get to name him?" Stiles asks.

Derek nods, petting Lucy absentmindedly.

"I thought we needed a stronger relationship for that," Stiles says, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

"Oh, right. Pay up," Derek says, grabbing Stiles by his bicep and pulling him toward him.

"How?" Stiles squeaks.

Derek kisses him quiet.

* * *

In the living room, the two kittens have completely unraveled the ball of yarn, and the the room is covered in yellow.

Stiles suggests he name the two cats "Loki" and "Gabriel."

Derek tells him to leave and promptly names the two kittens Cole and Nigel, if only to prevent Erica from agreeing with Stiles.

Or worse, naming one of them _Shadow_.

Stiles laughs about that and kisses Derek until he says he can stay.

* * *

A/N: For the record, I had a cat named Shadow but I got him when i was eight and that was excusable. Also calicos hold the most special place in my heart. I have had three. And I love(d) each of them dearly. And one of them did like to use my body as a tree...I have pictures of her sitting on my head.

Actually my current cat did that when she was a kitten too. Huh.

Anyway, Loki and Gabriel are lovely names for cats but Derek is against naming cats after characters. Except for Eeyore.


End file.
